Being gay is a curse when the homophobia you grew up with was so bad that you're homophobic yourself. Especially when you're into unavailable guys like your roommate, whose girlfriend is everything you're not (though appearances can be deceiving). S...
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The easiest way to deal with a situation like the Tavonna situation was to ignore it altogether. We only had a few classes together, and so I arrived late at every single one of them just to get the seat that was the farthest away from her. Every now and then, I wondered what she was thinking when she stared at me from across the lecture hall, but I didn't care enough to ask. I was perfectly fine with avoiding her at all costs.
To anyone else, it would have been obvious that this method was doomed to fail at some point, but I didn't realize this until Tavonna grew tired of my shenanigans and got up in the middle of our professor's introduction, and marched over to me. To my horror, she sat down right next to me and didn't say a single fucking word the entire lecture.
It was nerve-wracking, to say the least.
Every minute felt like a century and I'd counted the white lights in the ceiling and the sockets in the brick walls five times and a half, when the lecture had finally reached its end. I tried getting away from Tavonna as casually as I could—somehow mustering a tight smile and a nod—but that's when she decided to speak up, at last. "Nate, please."
I froze.
She walked around until she was in front of me and asked, "Are you ignoring me now?"
"Uh..."
"Look, I'm not... I don't wanna be—" She cut herself off and sighed at her own inability to form sentences, before blurting, "I'm sorry."
"What? What for?"
"For asking you why you weren't... interested. You don't have to tell me anything, of course," she hurried to say, crossing her arms behind her back. "We barely know each other, after all. I was just curious."
"Yeah, well." I shrugged. "Curiosity killed the cat."
She let out an awkward little chuckle and nodded.
It was silent for a while and I watched her shift on her feet, but when the silence became too much to bear, I told her, "Sorry for ignoring you, though. It's not because of you, by the way—why I'm not interested. It has nothing to do with you."
"Oh, okay... So then—No, nevermind."
I almost rolled my eyes. She really was too curious for her own good. I felt tempted to tell her I was gay just to get her off my back, like Jackson suggested, but I still had no idea how she would react, and I didn't feel like telling anyone about my sexual orientation anyway, whomever it might be, so I kept my mouth shut. Tavonna wasn't the only one I'd been avoiding. I was still rather peeved by Jackson's callous actions. It was a lot easier to avoid him, though, since he wasn't in our room as often as me—he was always out being popular or whatever—but when he was present, I just gave all my attention to my phone or a book and pretended he didn't exist.
